this may have been asked/answered elsewhere but I can't find it.... how fast do the slots fill up when the bell rings at 3pm EST next Tuesday? do i have a day, or 6 hours, or only 1 hour???

FYI, I live in NY so would have to register in the NYC area? or can I ship to say, Ohio or Atlanta if NYC fills up?

-red

you can pick any 1 region to send your entries.

considering how things have been going, of the three choices you give, I'd say 6 hours to fill up some locations and 1 day to fill up most. I believe last year after 8 hours it was over 2/3 full at 5500 entries and at least one region was completely full with others nearly there. Assuming you want the local region I'd plan to be online in that first several hours...

It will happen fast. Last year was around 2 days or a little less to fill the US regions IIRC, someone with a better memory can correct me. If the conference is any indication, it will fill up faster this year. The addition of another first round site and the entry cap/brewer will help some, but the hobby is growing so fast don't be late to the keyboard.

You can enter any first round site. You have to send all of you entries to that site.

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Jeff RankertAnn Arbor Brewers GuildAHA Governing Committee BJCP NationalHome-brewing, not just a hobby, it is a lifestyle!

this may have been asked/answered elsewhere but I can't find it.... how fast do the slots fill up when the bell rings at 3pm EST next Tuesday? do i have a day, or 6 hours, or only 1 hour???

FYI, I live in NY so would have to register in the NYC area? or can I ship to say, Ohio or Atlanta if NYC fills up?

-red

Hi Red,

Typically the competition closest to where the Homebrewers Conference (Philadelphia) takes place fills up first, so that will be the New York competition. After that fills up (and I expect it will only take a few hours for that to happen), the next closest competitions will begin to fill up; that will be the Zanesville, OH and Atlanta, GA competitions. Plan accordingly when you register. You'll be able to see how many entries have been logged against the competition on the main landing page, as well as the landing page for the individual competitions.

This seems like a perfect use case for something like Amazon Web Services, where you can rent additional capacity for known high-volume periods. The vast majority of the year, the registration site does nothing. Then when registration opens, it gets slammed. Some sort of cloud-based service would be the most cost-effective way to prepare for demand peaks like today.

There are some technical issues that it would be good to work out (and perhaps those of us who work in the field might be able to contribute to doing so), but the fact that it fills up so quickly, even in spite of the technical hurdles, tells us that there's a bigger problem of capacity. I know this is a regular subject of discussion, but absent the ability to make the competition itself much larger, it might make sense to have some way to allocate entries besides having the ability to sit in front of a computer and hit "refresh" all afternoon. For example, some kind of lottery - give people a week or two to enter and register, and then randomly choose as many entries as possible from among them.

(I'll also be curious to see the distribution of entries-per-person this year. I don't know how much it would help to dial it back from 15 to, say, 5 or 3, but that should be on the table, even if it makes things like the Ninkasi award less sensible).